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“Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic silent EOL of the product”

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Re: “Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic silent EOL of the product”

#151

Post by quickben »

AndyMcConachie wrote: post #135
quickben wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nature of things unfortunately. I did my internship at Nortel. A decade later and having worked from small shops to IBM and beyond, nothing comes close to the quality of people/code that I saw at Nortel. From another perspective: It is up to you to carry the torch now.

Software gets shittier because speed of development and time to market continues to outweigh any reason for quality. Code written 20-30 years ago almost always looks cleaner to me than the code I'm working on today :( What is the incentive for quality?

No incentive beyond personal satisfaction these days. Most people write and jump ship, which is so sad.

Re: “Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic silent EOL of the product”

#152

Post by Crontab »

tw04 wrote: post #108
Crontab wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having tried various Illumos-based operating systems, I could care less if they reopened Solaris with one exception: ZFS. I would like to see them alter the licensing terms of it so that it could be properly integrated into Linux. I believe they should consider this because Btrfs, which Oracle itself started, it going nowhere fast; and because Oracle customers who run Linux will benefit as well.

It's entirely and likely possible that part of their settlement with NetApp included NOT releasing it under GPL. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/09/oracle_netapp_zfs_d...

I forgot about the whole NetApp thing. Good point.

Re: “Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic silent EOL of the product”

#153

Post by hedora »

sjellis wrote: post #45
notalaser wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the meantime, a bunch of us developers are desperately trying to figure out what the fsck broke this time, drinking our sorrows about this new life where we can't debug anything that happens at boot, and frantically setting up BSDs on our laptops at home, so that we can at least get a break from this mess when we're at home. I (thankfully only) used to do Linux BSPs in a former life. In the last year or so of doin…

"I (thankfully only) used to do Linux BSPs in a former life. In the last year or so of doing that, I think we spent about 15-20% of a project's time debugging systemd problems and working around it being too smart for its own good." It would be great to see in-depth experience reports for systemd, good and bad. The overwhelming majority of anti-systemd commentary has just been noise for so long, and as somebody who i…

I avoid systemd like the plague, but have hit these bugs anyway:

They keep having embarrassing security exploits (like remote code execution in the dns reimplementation, or handing root to strange usernames by design).

Many people say they broke logging because the binary files create administrative nightmares and are flakey by design. Ubuntu LTS' systemd logging subsystem definitely broke a bunch of production machines I work with by stealing control from rsyslog during a botched update. We have a bunch of tooling for log processing and shipping. The systemd binary format is a usability nightmare compared to .gz files.

Being a member of the "video" group is no longer enough to use DRI or the new rootless X11 stuff. One of the crucial system calls has been hardcoded to only work when invoked by UID zero. The kernel maintainer rejected a one line patch to fix it. The argument is that systemd can launder the call through its own authentication subsystem, so the kernel doesn't need to implement workable permissions for /dev/ anymore. I have no idea how far that brain damage has spread. Just "chown root:root /dev/video; chmod og-rwx" if you want systemd! Don't proactively break every non-systemd distro out there by intentionally crippling the kernel API!

I've noticed that systemd debian-derived desktops age poorly -- uninstall a bunch of packages and reinstall, and you will find you can no longer log in correctly. I never managed to root cause it. It looked like init issues with multiple repros across multiple OS vendors.

Re: “Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic silent EOL of the product”

#154

Post by [deleted] »

jokr004 wrote: post #131
lokedhs wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Illumos is a great project and doesn't get nearly as much attention as it should. I'm also glad that ZFS has managed to find its way to other operating systems. I've been a huge fan of it ever since it first arrived in Solaris.

I discovered the Illumos project about a year ago and was extatic to see that Open Solaris had come back to life. I've been using OpenIndiana as my daily driver at work for a while now.

[deleted]

Re: “Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic silent EOL of the product”

#155

Post by kpil »

heybrother wrote: post #141
peoplewindow wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it have been different if any other company had bought Sun? Solaris was competing against free, without much to justify the large added cost. It's been a very long time since I heard of anyone buying new Solaris installations.

I don't know if it would've been any different for Solaris, but I can imagine Google would've been a whole lot better off owning Java. They probably would've been far better stewards too. Even if they win Oracle v Google, it's been a huge distraction, a huge cost in lawyers (who knows how much they'll recoup), a big unknown and the search for an alternative has to be costly and time-consuming. $8.3 billion almost see…

To be fair I don't think that Oracle have been particularly bad to Java, except beeing Oracle.

I doubt Google was ever an alternative. Realistically it was a fight for power over the enterprise customers between IBM and Oracle, with most (non OS) products built or integrated with Java.

Maybe it was even a hot potato- someone needed to keep their strategic bet alive, since Microsoft also share the same strategy in the enterprise app segment. (Sell complex but underperforming applications to ill-advised customers using long feature lists.)

Re: “Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic silent EOL of the product”

#156

Post by znpy »

Just FOUR DAYS AGO, someone posted:

>>... most of the recent innovations in Solaris's core technologies (DTrace, ZFS, Zones, etc) have all happened in illumos.

> As a core Solaris dev at Oracle, I can tell you that's not true. I just can't prove it to you. :-(

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15125355

Re: “Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic silent EOL of the product”

#157

Post by coredog64 »

peoplewindow wrote: post #90
lokedhs wrote: post #81

I'm very saddened by what happens with what is left of Sun. I used to work at Sun, and the Solaris codebase is the most amazing C code I've ever worked with. I'm probably going to be accused of bias, but the Linux code is really messy compared to Solaris. Sun was already on the way down by the time I left many years ago, but what had happened since Oracle bought them has been nothing but depressing.

Would it have been different if any other company had bought Sun? Solaris was competing against free, without much to justify the large added cost. It's been a very long time since I heard of anyone buying new Solaris installations.

ISTR rumors that Google was interested in Sun for their IP. I think that would have worked out well. No stupid Java API trial, Solaris truly open source, ZFS in more places. Fujitsu probably would have wound up with the hardware side of SPARC, and I could imagine that Dell or IBM would have taken the server/storage stuff for close to what Sun sold for.

Re: “Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic silent EOL of the product”

#158

Post by hedora »

xenophonf wrote: post #72
isatty wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using FreeBSD for servers and thankfully Gentoo remains on OpenRC. If they switch I'll move my home computers to FreeBSD too.

Except FreeBSD is considering moving to something like launchd or systemd itself, because honestly a SMF isn't a bad idea compared to init scripts, which are rather bare bones.

SMF runs circles around systemd. I used it recently, and realized it is what systemd is trying to clone.

It was kind of like learning Unix after coming from a DOS background.

If FreeBSD switches to systemd, I'll stick with OpenBSD. OpenBSD is as likely to switch as they are to rewrite the kernel in rust and go.

Re: “Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic silent EOL of the product”

#159

Post by hedora »

digi_owl wrote: post #59
jacquesm wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As an application developer and hobby sysadmin, systemd is a godsend over the misconfigured and broken stuff distributions have delivered for years. And that is roughly the size of the problem. If you're an application developer or a hobby sysadmin then probably systemd is good for you, but if you're an experienced sysadmin it spells 'fixed what wasn't broken' and it re-introduces many issues that were already thou…

Bingo. Way way too much of Linux these days is by devs for devs, and screw everyone else. Note the rise of "devops" that is basically about getting a straight line from devs to management so devs can sideline ops and their naysaying of the latest shinies devs wnats to sprinkle the projects with. Another thing is that there is less and less interest in maintenance, because maintenance is not fun. The GNU generation i…

This is the CADT development model, and has been working (sort of) for at least a decade:

https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

Re: “Oracle laid off all Solaris tech staff in a classic silent EOL of the product”

#160

Post by smarks »

DonHopkins wrote: post #142

I wonder if the poor guy from Sun with the Worst Job in the World was hired by Oracle and still has his terrible job? http://eng.umd.edu/~blj/funny/worst-job.html

Ha, that's funny. I had almost forgotten about the SunOS-vs-Solaris wars. Everybody wanted to hang onto SunOS as long as possible. Seems ironic that (many) people feel this way about Solaris now.
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